[Bitcoin-development] Some current turbulence on the Bitcoin network: DB corruption errors on start from Bitcoin-qt / Bitcoind

[Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com>]

Please return your seats and fasten your seat-belts.

All Bitcoin-qt / Bitcoind nodes will currently fail to come back up
after a restart, reporting

": *** coin database inconsistencies found"
and
"Do you want to rebuild the block database now?"

Reindexing _will not_ correct the problem.  In Bitcoin-qt you should
say no to this reindex prompt as it will not help for this problem and
will only waste your time.

To workaround:

Please specify the command-line or configuration file argument
-checklevel=2  to Bitcoind or Bitcoin-qt.

The issue appears to have been introduced by 0.8.0 and is only a local
issue, beyond the annoyance restarting nodes it appears to be harmless
and carries no forking risk but will take a software update to fix
completely.

This problem will persist until no more than 288 blocks after 256818,
unless another trigger transaction is added to the blockchain (which
may well happen).

More information will be forthcoming once a patch is available.